Perfect
by sapphire-child
Summary: Her death touched something in him he’d never felt before and he’s not been the same since. Every morning he goes to place a posy on her grave, the beautiful perfect child who died in his arms.


Title: Perfect  
Spoilers: up to 2x06  
Original post date: 1st December 2005  
Summary: Her death touched something in him he'd never felt before and he's not been the same since. Every morning he goes to place a posy on her grave, the beautiful perfect child who died in his arms.  
Disclaimer: I do not own Charlie, Claire, Aaron or any of the other characters and situations and just general stuff portrayed in this fic. I'm just borrowing them and I promise I will give them back in due course once I've finished angsting with them  
Soundtrack: Damien Rice – Cold Water

* * *

He's standing in the water again, letting the waves wash over his feet, his eyes looking always outwards at the endless horizon. He used to do that with me once but it's been a long time now and I have no time for it anymore.

Time has moved on for everyone else but him – but then Charlie has always been haunted by the past.

His past.

It took us several years of trying before I became pregnant. I remember how excited everyone was for us. Charlie didn't stop smiling for days. Aaron was still very young then but he was elated at the prospect of having a little brother or sister to play with – us adults were often too busy to play with him and he was left to his own devices.

'I'll teach it how to make sandcastles and swim and climb trees and…'

Both of them adored my belly bump as it swelled and grew. Aaron would often say hello to it and I would begin to answer him before realising he was talking to the baby inside me. I remember the touch of his small hands, roaming over my naked belly, Charlie grinning like a Cheshire cat beside me.

'Is that it? Is that the baby right there? Is that the baby's foot?'

'That's the head Aaron,'

'How long till it's born? How long mummy?'

'A little while yet Mister Turnip,' Charlie talked to the baby as well. He sang lullabies to it every night and tickled the taut skin until I was breathless with giggles and then he would kiss my bellybutton and smile softly up at me. 'We're having a baby Claire,'

'I know,' I'd reply, both my hands guiding his down the length of a miniscule spine to find a knee, a foot.

A heartbeat.

People say that pregnant women always glow. I don't know whether I ever did that but Charlie sure did. Every time I saw him his eyes were bright and he always had a goofy little half grin on his face that nobody could seem to shake off.

Now it takes so much to make him smile we've stopped trying.

I carried the baby the full nine months with next to no problems. Jack warned us over and over that if there were any serious complications he wouldn't be able to help.

'The baby'll be fine,' Charlie said confidently, one hand rubbing my tummy like I was a Buddha. 'Look at Aaron! He was fine wasn't he?'

'He wasn't conceived or carried for the majority of his term here,' Jack reminded us.

'The baby'll be fine,' Charlie repeated. 'Right love?'

It was Charlie's blind faith that we held onto throughout the moments of doubt and worry. And it was Charlie's blind faith that turned out to be our – _his_ – downfall.

The labour was difficult and long, even with Jack's help. Kate was merely assisting, glad she didn't have to deliver this baby by herself, and Sun was looking after Aaron. Charlie was there the whole time; his hand must have been nearly broken by the time our daughter came into the world.

'We have a daughter,' Charlie was so close to crying, his eyes bright with wondrous tears as he handed her to me. 'She's _perfect_ Claire. Look – a beautiful, beautiful baby girl.'

I was too exhausted to say anything in return; I just grinned wearily at him and let him kiss me all over my face. Aaron came tentatively in once we'd mopped the place up a bit.

'You have a little sister,'

Aaron touched her little face gently, wonderingly. 'A sister.'

He went to sleep beside me, it was well into the early hours of the morning and he had refused to go to bed whilst I was giving birth and as a result, was completely exhausted.

Charlie took her from me and was holding her, still grinning, still crying when Jack asked if he could check her out.

And it was in the moment that Charlie got ready to pass her over that she stopped breathing.

The time from there till morning is chaotic, scrambled and disjointed in my memory. I remember Jack trying desperately to revive the tiny body that lay limp in Charlie's arms whilst I sat there, dizzy from the pain, unable to do or say anything that might have been helpful whilst my baby slipped away.

I fell asleep, exhausted with pain and befuddled by the chaos around me. At sunrise I woke to find Charlie crumpled next to me, our daughter cold in his arms, his face on his knees.

'Charlie?' I mumbled his name until he answered, voice trembling.

'She was perfect.'

I was silent.

'I held her,' he looked up at me, his eyes were awful, swollen and red and his voice broke with every juddered word. 'She was so perfect, so n-new, and-and I was holding her and then she just...'

The sobs that came then sounded like they might tear him apart. Aaron was awake beside me, sobbing silently into my hip. He heard and he knew and worse he _understood_ that his little sister was gone.

'We didn't even name her!' we held the tiny, fragile body between us as we wept. 'What happened? What did we do wrong Claire? She was perfect, she _is_ perfect!'

Nobody had an answer to that. Not me. Not Charlie. Not Jack.

Aaron's birth was followed by death as well, but this was infinitely worse. Everyone was there to pay their respects and offer their simple, empty condolences. I stood tall, one hand on Aaron's shoulder as Jack said a few awkward words and when he had finished, we knelt to place a posy on the miniscule grave next to Boone and Shannon and all the others we'd laid to rest.

Charlie stood just behind us, head bowed, eyes closed in a silent agony as he twisted his own posy between his fingers, shredding the delicate flowers he had picked. He stayed after everyone had left to put his flower down and then he sat there at the foot of the grave sifting the freshly turned earth through his hands until they were black.

'It's a hard blow for him,' John said sagely as we watched Charlie from further down the beach. Aaron was in my arms, his face buried in my hair and there were tears rolling slowly down my face. 'It may take a long time for him to stop grieving.'

Charlie lay stiff beside me that night and Aaron crept out of his bed and in between us, trying to fill the emptiness where his sister should have been residing. The next morning I got up and set about my usual routine. A sort of numb acceptance had taken me and Aaron automatically followed my lead, if a little slower and more melancholy than usual.

Charlie's first action that morning however was to go to the grave and place a small, sad posy on it to replace the ones from the day before. This quickly became a necessary routine for him. Every day, rain or shine, before he did anything else, he would go to the grave of our daughter and give her a flower as beautiful and perfect as she was.

Then at the end of each day he would stand in the shallows of the ocean and watch the sun go down, memorising another sunset so he could tell her about it when he found her soul once his life was spent. I began to do that with him but after a while I stopped. I had other things to do – like raising Aaron – because Charlie wasn't doing a lot in that department anymore.

It was months before we even _thought_ about making love again but then one night I saw Aaron bundling up his things to go and spend the night with Hurley and I knew that Charlie was trying so hard to move on...

I couldn't deny him.

And everything was fine until he began to hesitate.

'What's wrong?'

'Nothing.'

And so it went on.

'Charlie, what's _wrong?'_

'_Nothing.'_

We nearly did manage in the end but next thing he had rolled off me and was crying into my hair, his hands grasping pathetically at my body for some sort of comfort I couldn't give.

'I'm sorry Claire,' I moved so I could hold him properly and he clung to me desperately, whispering in my ear, his breath warm on my skin. 'I'm so sorry...'

'It wasn't your fault Charlie,'

It became easier after that first awkward time, and more frequent. Charlie seemed to get better but he kept visiting her every morning and he still didn't smile. We had moments sometimes, whole minutes even where he'd be almost like he used to and he would smile or make a joke but then his eyes would wander in the direction of her grave and his smile would fade and the moment would pass.

'He'll be okay,' Jack reassured me. 'He'll be fine. He's just grieving.'

Aaron and I stayed well away from the grave unless Charlie got lost there all day and we had to bring him home to our fire. Then Aaron would nuzzle up beside him until Charlie finally cuddled him back.

Sometimes he was too distant for either of us to reach him and it was then that I got scared. The way he looked at me sometimes when I led him back to our shelter plainly said that he didn't understand why I wasn't still grieving for her, although he never said so out loud. Why was it that the death of our child could matter so little to me?

Did Charlie mean that little to me that I simply didn't care?

But he never said anything. And I never volunteered anything. And so we drifted closer and further apart for a long time and the ocean rose and fell as it always did.

He's standing in the water again, letting the waves wash over his feet, his eyes looking always outwards at the endless horizon. He used to do that with me once but it's been a long time now and I have no time for it anymore.

Except for today.

'Hey,'

He doesn't acknowledge me at first but then his hand slips out to curl around my waist, feather light.

'A whole year.' He murmurs, his voice almost getting lost in the sound of waves and wind.

'I know.'

A lingering pause.

'I saw you and Aaron putting flowers down.'

'Of course we did,' I'm not sure why I'm whispering, mostly so that he doesn't hear the tremor in my voice. 'She was my daughter as well Charlie.'

'She died in my arms,' it's not an accusation exactly but it still stings. 'She died and I still don't know why.'

I lean my forehead against his shoulder, biting my lip. 'Because she was perfect.'

'Perfect,' Charlie agrees wretchedly. 'I don't understand how something…how she could just...'

'Charlie?'

He pauses mid sentence to look at me.

'Yes?'

'I love you,' Pause. 'So much.'

He is silent, wondering what will come next.

But my throat is too constricted by the ever-growing lump there. It's been so long since I grieved for her – for us – that I've almost forgotten what it feels like to hurt this way. I try to speak, silently berating myself. _Only two words! Only three syllables! How can it be so hard to say this Claire?_

My eyes drop to my hands, clasped in front of me as the waves play tag around my ankles. Charlie realises after a moment that I'm about a millisecond from completely losing it and he turns to me and clasps my hands gently in his.

'Don't use words,' the waves laugh over our feet, mingling with the familiar rough-soft of his voice. 'If you can't say it, then don't use words.'

His hands are already in mine, so it's all too easy for me to take them and splay them on my stomach.

For a moment he doesn't dare speak, afraid that he has misinterpreted me in some way but then he whispers, 'Again?' and his eyes searching mine for the answer he already has.

I nod my head, the tiniest inclination possible and just as I begin to cry he smiles his first real smile in over a year.

_Fin._


End file.
